Using Terrain plug-in as a pose?

[R Reynolds]

I'm working on a continuous 2 min. "shot from a drone" clip of my locomotive traveling for 1 mi.(1.6 km) to check for smoke and steam dynamics/densities and various lo-res cheats on the stone ballast that embeds the railroad tracks. It begins as a long shot, moving to a close-up and ending as a "running along beside" medium shot. The surrounding countryside is made up of twenty-one instances of the same one tenth of a square mile mesh arrayed along either side of the track.

To add variety to each landscape instance I plan on applying a different pose to each one. The left ten instances shown already have some poses applied. While I was styling another pose, mostly using Magnet mode, I thought this might be a good time to use the Terrain plug-in. It makes fine looking meshes but the only way I can see to get that formed mesh into an action is to add it to the original mesh model and then match that shape in the model's pose, one CP at a time - all 4096 of them; do-able but mind numbing.

 

Anyone have any better suggestions?

 

[robcat2075]

How would you get all the edges of neighboring tiles to be matching elevations?

[robcat2075]

Crazy idea...

 

What if the ground was stationary patches and giant decals for displacement and color were sliding on it to create the illusion of movement?

The downside is that displacement is slow to render.

 

See Fucher's post, below...

[Rodney]

I like the idea of the moving displacement map.

 

 

The terrain wizard is nice but I think for your needs it's not ideal.

[robcat2075]

I'll note that a sliding decal is done not with an traditional decal but with a "Projection Map" material.

[robcat2075]

Whoops! It turns out "displacement" is not one of the choices you can makefor Projection Maps. Sorry!

 

An animated decal could do the same effect although motion blur is harder to accommodate.

[Fuchur]

Whoops! It turns out "displacement" is not one of the choices you can makefor Projection Maps. Sorry!

 

An animated decal could do the same effect although motion blur is harder to accommodate.

 

You can give any material a Displacement-Map or Bump-Map value.

If you use it (located at the material properties itself) the whole material will be used as bump/displacement map-value, no longer for color.

You can then just copy that material (save as > "name", embed it again and import the saved one and embed again with a different name) and get rid of the displacement value there again.

 

See the screen cap I did about it below. That should be what you are after, right?

 

Best regards

*Fuchur*

projection_map_displacement.mp4

[Guest]

Thanks the suggestions. I just might use them.

 

 

How would you get all the edges of neighboring tiles to be matching elevations?

 

 

Pretty straightforward; you have the original flat mesh and the imported deformed terrain mesh whose cp's are on the same XZ coords and unselectable. Then in the action you view the two at a very oblique angle so you can see one whole line of cp's. The posing of each cp in the Y axis to match the terrain mesh would be the perfect job for an intern; like being an in-betweener but worse since it requires almost no skill.

 

[robcat2075]

Even though displacement rendering is somewhat slow, I thing it is worth investigating since you could paint the gray scale maps for it faster than you can model these very dense grids.

Displacement doesn't require dense geometry.